Sunderland (United Kingdom) (AFP)
Japanese car maker Nissan announced Thursday that it plans to build a UK battery mega-factory next to its existing Sunderland site where it will also manufacture a new electric vehicle, boosting its energy transition in Europe. .
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has called a "major vote of confidence in the United Kingdom" this post-Brexit investment which totals 1 billion pounds in the largest European plant of Nissan, and which will generate 6,200 jobs at Nissan and its suppliers .
Nissan's battery supplier, the Chinese Envision AESC, will invest 450 million pounds in this plant which will run on renewable energies and will equip 100,000 electric vehicles of the group per year.
Nissan plans to spend up to 423 million pounds on an all-electric vehicle that will rely on "Nissan's expertise in (4x4) crossovers".
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Sunderland City Council will complete the £ 1 billion investment in the manufacturing complex dubbed EV36Zero and dubbed "the world's leading electric vehicle manufacturing ecosystem."
"This is a historic day for Nissan, our partners, the UK and the automotive industry," said Nissan COO Ashwani Gupta from the Sunderland assembly lines, adding that "electrification is crucial in the fight against climate change ".
Nissan, which warned that a no-deal Brexit would threaten the existence of its Sunderland plant, which opened 35 years ago, estimated that the trade agreement signed before Christmas between London and Brussels would allow the continuation of its activity in UK.
- Battery race -
"The cars made in this factory, the batteries made right down the street in the UK's first gigabyte of this scale, will play a major role in our transition from gasoline and diesel cars to electric vehicles," argued UK Enterprise Minister Kwasi Kwarteng.
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The United Kingdom, which is committed to carbon neutrality for 2050, is stepping up environmental announcements ahead of the COP26 international meeting on climate change, which will take place in Glasgow in November.
The Japanese group had recently faced a series of difficulties, from a slowdown in demand due to the pandemic to the fallout from the arrest of its former boss Carlos Ghosn, now in Lebanon after having illegally fled Japan in December 2019.
It also delayed the launch initially planned for this summer of its Ariya electric model to this winter because of the microprocessor supply problems that plague the entire automotive sector.
Renault, the French partner of Nissan and Mitsubishi Motors, unveiled on Monday the establishment in Douai in the north of France of a battery mega-factory from AESC, the Japanese battery subsidiary of Envision, which will invest 2 billion euros and create 1,000 jobs locally by 2025 and 2,500 by 2028.
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Guillaume Cartier, Nissan president for Europe, welcomed the fact that the partners within the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance are using the same subcontractor for the batteries, which he says will generate "synergies" , he told AFP.
He did not confirm press information indicating a planned launch date in 2024 for the plant but stressed that the group "anticipates (...) that in 2023 all the product line sold in Europe will be electrified ".
The main body of the British patronage, the CBI, estimated that the investment in Sunderland should "give the spark for the six other giga-factories which are needed by 2040 to supply the growing market for electric vehicles and stimulate the establishment of a vast loading network ".
Faced with the explosion in sales of electric cars, Europe has started to repatriate the battery production sector and now has 38 factory projects, but remains far from autonomy.
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Edison Luo, analyst at Rystard Energy, notes that the "electric vehicle market is increasingly dependent on Chinese battery components", hence a "race for battery capacity in Europe and the UK" , observes Peter Wells, professor of economics at Cardiff University.
Manufacturers who fail to generate enough battery capacity for their cars "will lose market share," he warns.
© 2021 AFP